The Right to Being Let Alone: A Dying and a Faltering Privilege Essay

Privacy can be considered as one of the most valuable possessions and privileges. Everyday, people are being bugged and alarmed by the growth of privacy-evading technologies that penetrate their personal information, personal space, and personal moments. Lately, a telephone technology has been developed which enables companies to have a “back door” to people’s privacy setting installed in their telephones. Aside from this, there are also the restless cameras installed in the elevators, restaurants, parking areas, common rooms, lounge areas, apartments, and all the other places where people least expect to be watched.

As years pass, the technology becomes more unpredictable that people can no longer foresee what effects it will cause. Nowadays, as more and more people get fascinated by the new technological advancements, the number of people being victimized by privacy evasion is increasing as well. As the internet continues to soar in the 21st century, an increasing number of people are becoming hooked to file sharing and information sharing applications through their personal computers and the World Wide Web (Garfinkel).

However, blinded by such phenomenal and culture-changing applications and programs, people do not notice that day by day, as they share more and more information to strangers online, their personal and private space becomes smaller and more limited. Today, computers are able to reach a wide variety of functions, may it be car computers, electronic mailing, electronic data transmission, electronic voice mails, and a lot of other services. As these services continue to evade people’s daily tasks, it has also been inevitable for these services to access and make use of these people’s personal information.

Although privacy evasion has been a popular constant subject of argument and mass campaigns in the world today, a lot of people are still being blinded by the real meaning of privacy. Privacy is being deprived from a woman if she refuses to use the internet for fear of her background information being maliciously stolen by some hacker. Moreover, privacy can be considered stolen from a man when he is no longer comfortable with walking with his girlfriend down the streets because of some suspicious cameras that steal their personal moments (Garfinkel).

More often than not, people see privacy as something which hides their personal intentions, their secret desires, and their illegal activities, but in reality, privacy matters when the goodness of personal space and personal moments are being taken away from an individual without any legal or valid bases (Garfinkel). Over the years, the United States has made several efforts to eradicate such privacy evasion schemes. A lot of programs and bills have been proposed, but only a few have literally helped out against privacy evasion.

From Carter to Bush’s administrations, the constant cry of the people against the suspicious nosing, monitoring, and meddlesome activities made possible by the recent information and communication technology has not yet ceased (Garfinkel). Yet, the government still believes in several ways that these evading acts can help in avoiding any terrorism and criminal possibilities. Earlier, people realized that using up the environment does not actually contribute to a society’s progress since humankind will never be able to survive if the natural environment dies.

Thus, people must also realize that communication technologies will not prosper as well because of privacy evasion (Garfinkel). The right of being let alone may be hard to acquire nowadays, but the problem does not lie on how to stop such acts but on how to let people realize that they can do something prevent it. Work Cited Garfinkel, Simson. “Privacy Under Attack. ” Ed. Dorothy U. Seyler. Read, Reason, Write. New Jersey: McGraw Hill College. 1999. 408-417.

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